Archive for the 'PPC Basics' Category

Guest post by John Lee

While skimming through my blog reader this morning, I stumbled on a post that gave me a fit of the giggles. Somehow, the Microsoft adCenter blog had found a way to tie the buying cycle back to fly fishing! After reading, my giggles quickly turned into a thoughtful smirk as understanding and agreement sunk in. Targeting your customers with pay-per-click is a delicate process that involves a deep understanding of seasonality, trends and cyclical behavior – much like fly fishing. This great post was a gentle reminder of one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates with PPC – target your customers (trout?) at each stage of the buying cycle.

How do you harness the power of PPC to do just that? It all comes down to segmentation. But first things first, you must understand the buying cycle. At its simplest form, the buying cycle is Research, Shop and Purchase. Easy enough. Your task as a search marketer is then to segment your efforts, and subsequently your keywords, based on each phase of the cycle. Here is a quick breakdown of how your keywords should be segmented for targeting the buying cycle:

RESEARCH

• Customers in the research phase are asking themselves the most basic of questions - What is a blog? Cell Phones? You get the picture…
• To effectively target customers in the research phase, you need to cast a wide net with your keywords (I couldn’t help myself, sorry).
• These customers who are performing research are entering general keyword phrases into the search engines.
• A lot of advertisers make the poor assumption that general keywords should be paused or deleted because they don’t directly turn into conversions. Wrong.
  • Bidding low on general keywords will keep your costs down, but your exposure up on the SERPs – the goal here is really just to be seen by your potential customers.

SHOP

• Customers who are shopping have moved past the “Cell Phones?” phase and are now on the hunt.
• Targeting these customers is pretty simple if you just attach some modifiers to your general keywords – i.e. buy, purchase, review, etc..
  • You can also begin to introduce variations here. For our cell phone example – start introducing keywords like “touch screen cell phone” or “internet capable cell phone.”
• If you know anything about the long tail of search, think of this phase of the buying cycle as the middle ground between “head” and “tail.”
• In terms of bidding, you want to start increasing bids in order to creep up the search results and become top of mind for these customers.
  • Your ad for “buy cell phones” should certainly be in the top 5 for the best traction.

PURCHASE

• If it wasn’t clear already, this is when customers are ready to buy. They should know you, and they should know your product/service.
• You should be really driving home the long tail keywords here. Include brand names, specific products.
• Bidding strategy? Crank ‘em up – these are customers who are ready to buy right now! You’ll blast your ROI outta the park with these keywords.
  • Assume you’re AT&T – you better be out bidding everyone for “buy iPhone 3G.”

This breakdown will get you well on your way to targeting your customers with PPC at each stage of the buying cycle. Though you should know, this is just the tip of the buying cycle iceberg. There are plenty of other tools in your tackle box (I had to, right?) to support your superb keyword segmentation. Your ad texts and landing pages play critical roles in ensuring that once you’ve snagged a customer at each stage of the buying cycle that they come back around for the next stage! My thanks to the adCenter blog for giving me a laugh, and better yet a reminder of another great PPC tactic.

John Lee works for Bloomington, Indiana based Hanapin Marketing where he manages both PPC and SEO campaigns and is a permanent fixture at PPCHero.com.

Start off by downloading a Keyword Report for a previous Time Period out of Adwords report center. Sort by your specific success metric (eg: Cost-Per-Coversion, Orders, etc.).

Create a new Adwords campaign using the Google Buildout Spreadsheet (Excel). This new campaign will replace the pre-existing campaign.

1. Only use the keywords that converted from the previous time period. This is effectively cutting away all the excessive “no results” keyword spending.
2. Bucket the keywords into tight-knit adgroups.
3. Write fresh ad copy for all the adgroups. Write two ads per adgroup so you can a/b split test ads, and conduct an ad optimization.
4. Customize the Display URL’s to contain the keyword representative for that adgroup (eg: www.mysite.com/keyword).
5. Keep the CPC’s the same to launch with. After launch conduct daily bid mgmt.
6. Use multiple Destination URL’s. This is for testing purposes.

After you get client approval, upload the spreadsheet using Adwords Editor. Once the campaign is live here are some things to do for every adgroup in the Adwords account:

1. Pause underperforming keywords that are bleeding the account without converting.
2. Reduce bids into lower positions for keywords that have a high cost per conversion.
3. Add more keywords to select adgroups.
4. Change some Keyword Matching Options.
5. After you get a little more data in the account, conduct an Ad Optimization.

It’s ideal to use a significant amount of data to make additional changes. Typically 50-100 clicks per converting term, or another metric to watch like a threshold for Cost-Per-Conversion.

You just launched your PPC Campaign. Now what?

It’s time to follow your PPC Strategy document, and make all the day-to-day tactical executions and implementations necessary to optimize the campaign to the success metrics.

Post-Launch PPC Optimizations:
1) Daily Bid Management / Bidding Strategies.
2) A/B Split testing (Ads, Landing pages).
3) Ad optimization / Ad creation.
4) Create customized Landing pages.
5) Keyword expansion / Keyword Bucketing.
6) Search Engine Expansion & Contraction (possibly using 2nd Tier Search Engines). Consumer behavior will dictate how to manage & optimize budget allocation based on traffic/performance metrics on each search engine.
7) Measuring. Testing. Reporting.

Client Meetings/Phone Calls:
Schedule weekly “real-time” campaign status meetings to discuss campaign performance, optimizations, and recommendations. Send the proposed agenda to your client, and ask them if they would like to add anything to the list.

Sample PPC agenda:
1) Improving landing page quality.
2) Brainstorm session to discover new keywords.( 25% of all searches on Google have never been searched for before).
3) Discussion of campaign performance in relation to campaign objectives (PPC Goals).
4) Discussion of Web Analytics & Conversion Tracking.
5) Click Fraud Management / Philosophy.

Related Posts:
PPC Campaign “Kick-off” Templates.
PPC Strategy document.
How to Upload an Adwords Bulksheet.
Monthly PPC Performance Report Template.
Methods To Increase CTR on PPC Ads.
4 Steps To Optimize Google Adwords Content Targeting Campaigns.
Integrating PPC search ads with online display ads.
Google MCC Accounts - Generating Invoices.

If you are running both Search & Content in your Search Campaigns it’s very likely your overall CTR is low. That’s because ads within the content networks (eg: adsense, YPN, etc) receive a huge amount of impressions, and low clicks. The Content Networks are pulling your overall CTR down.

You can easily see the difference between the Search Only, and Content Only CTR by separating them thru generating a report. On Adword, just check the box for “Ad Distribution”. That way you’ll be able to Separate out the CTR metrics from Content Network and Search Only.

This is one of the basics of optimizing PPC Campaigns immediately after they’ve launched. You’ll need a large enough data sample to make intelligent decisions. Depending on your daily budget, you might not need to wait more than 1 day to begin optimizing PPC ads for CTR because you’ve received a lot of campaign data. Campaigns with smaller daily budgets and less search volume might need to wait for several days before accumlating a large enough data sample.

8 Methods to increase CTR on your PPC ads:

1) Ad Copy. Writing compelling PPC ad copy. There are 4 Combinations of Ad Creative & Keyword Targeting:

a) With broad targeting and general creative, the creative is de-signed for maximum reach and mass appeal, such as with a free offer or another promotion. If the campaign is successful, searchers will respond to the promotion, click rates will rise, and marketers can maintain their search ad ranking with lower bids. The downside is that total campaign cost will increase and conversion rates will be relatively low, compared with a more highly targeted campaign.

b) With broad targeting and specific creative, the creative is too targeted for the high volume of searches conducted. Most searchers won’t be interested, though the small percentage that are will be highly likely to convert. Still, low click-through rates mean that bid prices need to rise to maintain visibility. There is a tradeoff here, as the high conversion rate could offset the higher bid price.

c) With exact targeting and general creative, the creative isn’t as relevant for searchers with de-fined needs. Searchers pass on the ad, click rates drop, and bid prices need to rise to maintain the ad ranking. Using general creative with targeted ads is far too common a practice, despite the damage it can cause to a campaign.

d) But with exact targeting and specific creative, the creative matches the need of the searcher. Searchers relish the relevance, click-through rates soar, and bid prices can drop significantly. Conversion rates should also be strong.

2) Use a strong call-to-action in your ad text.
3) Use Negative Keywords.
4) Raising Bids.
5) Targeted Keywords.
6) Keyword Bucketing.
7) Use Keyword Matching options
Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

BEWARE of Impression Fraud. This is an unethical PPC tactic to artificially inflate the amount of impressions on a competitor, by searching for their keyword and not clicking on their ad….a whole lot of times. It will lower their CTR and Quality Score, and they’ll need to pay more Avg CPC to maintain their same position. The offending advertiser just pauses his own campaign so none of his ads get served while he is conducting Impression Fraud.

The Search Engines reward high CTR’s with a higher Quality Score. Thus, your reward will be a lower CPC, and higher position. More clicks, and hopefully a better ROI.

Search can drive traffic to a website all day long, but if the site sucks, then don’t expect high conversion rates. Hence, the need for Website Usability.

You just landed your first PPC client, now what?

Here’s a PPC Campaign kick-off spreadsheet that will help you create the PPC Strategy document.

Your client needs to identify things like:
1) Business Objective(s)
2) Are they using a third party partner (i.e. Omniture, WebTrends)? Account Log-In Information?
3) Are they using Bid Mgmt/Conversion Tracking software?
4) If there are multiple properties, do the campaigns/reports need to be set up separately?
5) Is there Historical Data?
6) Bulk sheets for all current or past campaigns?
7) Are there any restrictions? (Keywords, markets, match type, etc.)
Who are the Competitors?
9) Any promotions outside of search? If so, please indicate type of media and timing
10) Is there Seasonality? - Are there any seasons, months, or weeks that stand out performance wise?

And, you’ll want to manage expectations with this highly customizable PPC Campaign “Timeline to Launch” template. This provides a timeline from the initial contract approval, to the actual Campaign launch date, and everything in between.

If you have any PPC clients, you most likely have to send Monthly Performance Reports. It doesn’t matter whether you are running small or large PPC campaigns. Do you separate out Content from Search? Do you measure Conversions? How do you measure success? Do you include analysis?

Here is an example of my “basic” PPC Performance Report. It has many self-calculating formulas within the cells.

A written analysis of the campaign should be included. Whether you choose to include it on the Excel sheet, in the body of the email, or as a separate Word document is your choice. Personally, I like to include it underneath the Performance Report, and write something that is reflective of the summary in the body of the email.

Depending on the intensity of the PPC campaign, you may choose to create a weekly or monthly status report. Within the Status report, you should state:
1) Report Dates (reporting period timeframe).
2) Campaign Objectives
3) Key Highlights & Challenges
4) Optimizations/Creative Modifications
5) Upcoming Activities/Opportunities

In your written analysis be specific and quantifiable. Call out specific CPC’s, CTR, Avg Positions, ROAS, Conversion Rates, etc. Talk about what happened “out-of-the-gate”, and how you optimized the campaign. Talk about strategy. Talk about Keywords ( Brand vs Non-Brand). Talk about Search Engine performance, and possible Search Engine expansion. Talk about upcoming optimizations & activities/opportunities.

I have created many variations of the attached PPC Performance Report Template to include metrics such as Play Rate, CPM’s for Site Targeting, Content Network metrics, etc.

If you don’t have a PPC Performance Report Template, then this one is a good place to start.

Once your Google Account Team sets you up a My Client Center. You become empowered to upload accounts yourself, and link accounts to your MCC.

From that point forward, the only thing you’ll you’ll need them to do, is to generate a Service Agreement for each campaign you want to run. Here are the steps:
1) Build your own campaign using this Google Bulksheet template.
2) Load the campaign into Adwords Editor, and upload to Adwords.
3) Link the campaign to your MCC.

Here are the details…

Follow these steps in AdWords Editor to upload your campaign:

- Start with the “Campaign” tab and be sure to include the appropriate dates and daily budget.
- When uploading keywords, please click on the “Keyword” tab and hit the “Make Multiple Changes” button.
- Select “Add/Update Mulitiple Keywords”
- Hit the second radial button (My keyword information below includes…..)
- Then, copy the entire data area on the buildout spreadsheet within the “keywords” tab. Paste within the popup box in Adwords Editor. Then, hit finish!

To copy and paste text ads, you can follow these same steps but do so in the “Text Ads” tab. Additionally, once your CPCs have been set, please be sure to update and include an overall ad group CPC in the “Ad Group” tab.

Once you’ve uploaded the campaign from Adwords Editor into the Adwords interface, you still will NOT be able to see it in your MCC until you “Link” it to the MCC.

Now, go to your MCC. There should be a hyperlink on top of the campaign list that says, “Link existing account“. Click on the link, and type your CID (Customer ID number) into the box.

Now, go login to the individual adwords account you just linked. It will ask you to approve. Now, approve it.

That’s it. You’re finished. Congrats! The only thing you’ll need your Adwords team for now, is to generate Service Agreements.